Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Computing systems such as personal computers, laptop computers, tablet computers, and cellular phones, among many other types of Internet-capable computing systems, are increasingly prevalent in numerous aspects of modern life. As computing systems become progressively more integrated with users' everyday life, the convenience, efficiency, and intuitiveness of the manner in which users interact with the computing systems becomes progressively more important.
The trend toward miniaturization of computing hardware, peripherals, as well as sensors, detectors, and image and audio processors, among other technologies, has helped open up a field sometimes referred to as “wearable computing.” Wearable computers are, generally, highly portable, and may be designed to be usable at any time, with a minimum amount of cost or distraction from the wearer's primary task. That is, a wearable computer user's primary task may not be using the computer. Instead, it may be dealing with their environment while the computer plays a secondary, support, role. Note that such a secondary function need not be performed by a computer that is “wearable” per se; that is, other computing systems (e.g., other portable computing systems) may also support users' activities in a secondary capacity.
The secondary-task nature of such computing systems make them a natural match for computing applications that continuously run in the background, sensing their environment and occasionally proactively acting on behalf of their users. Nonetheless, to date, techniques for interacting with such computing systems are often considered inconvenient, inefficient, and/or non-intuitive by users. An improvement is therefore desired.